1. when followed by /s/ or /ns/, as in /last/ and /dance/.
2. when followed by /r/ preceding another consonant, as in /cart/.
4. when followed by /f/, /s/ or /th/, as in /laugh/, /pass/ and /path/.
The /u/-sound also shows certain differences between English and American usage. The English reduce the last syllable of /figure/ to /ger/; the educated American preserves the /u/-sound as in /nature/. The English make the first syllable of /courteous/ rhyme with /fort/; the American standard rhymes it with /hurt/. The English give an /oo/-sound to the /u/ of /brusque/; in America the word commonly rhymes with /tusk/. A /u/-sound, as everyone knows, gets into the American pronunciation of /clerk/, by analogy with /insert/; the English cling to a broad /a/-sound, by analogy with /hearth/. Even the latter, in the United States, is often pronounced to rhyme with /dearth/. The American, in general, is much less careful than the Englishman to preserve the shadowy /y/-sound before /u/ in words of the /duke/-class. He retains it in /few/, but surely not in /new/. Nor in /duke/, /blue/, /stew/, /due/, /duty/ and /true/. Nor even in /Tuesday/. Purists often attack the simple /oo/-sound. In 1912, for example, the Department of Education of New York City warned all the municipal high-school teachers to combat it.[92] But it is doubtful that one pupil in a hundred was thereby induced to insert the /y/ in /induced/. Finally there is /lieutenant/. The Englishman pronounces the first syllable /left/; the American invariably makes it /loot/. White says that the prevailing American pronunciation is relatively recent. "I never heard it," he reports, "in my boyhood."[93] He was born in New York in 1821.
The /i/-sound presents several curious differences. The English make it long in all words of the /hostile/-class; in America it is commonly short, even in /puerile/. The English also lengthen it in /sliver/; in America the word usually rhymes with /liver/. The [Pg175] short /i/, in England, is almost universally substituted for the /e/ in /pretty/, and this pronunciation is also inculcated in most American schools, but I often hear an unmistakable /e/-sound in the United States, making the first syllable rhyme with /bet/. Contrariwise, most Americans put the short /i/ into /been/, making it rhyme with /sin/. In England it shows a long /e/-sound, as in /seen/. A recent poem by an English poet makes the word rhyme with /submarine/, /queen/ and /unseen/.[94] The /o/-sound, in American, tends to convert itself into an /aw/-sound. /Cog/ still retains a pure /o/, but one seldom hears it in /log/ or /dog/. Henry James denounces this "flatly-drawling group" in "The Question of Our Speech,"[95] and cites /gawd/, /dawg/, /sawft/, /lawft/, /gawne/, /lawst/ and /frawst/ as horrible examples. But the English themselves are not guiltless of the same fault. Many of the accusations that James levels at American, in truth, are echoed by Robert Bridges in "A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation." Both spend themselves upon opposing what, at bottom, are probably natural and inevitable movements--for example, the gradual decay of all the vowels to one of neutral color, represented by the /e/ of /danger/, the /u/ of /suggest/, the second /o/ of /common/ and the /a/ of /prevalent/. This decay shows itself in many languages. In both English and High German, during their middle periods, all the terminal vowels degenerated to /e/--now sunk to the aforesaid neutral vowel in many German words, and expunged from English altogether. The same sound is encountered in languages so widely differing otherwise as Arabic, French and Swedish. "Its existence," says Sayce, "is a sign of age and decay; meaning has become more important than outward form, and the educated intelligence no longer demands a clear pronunciation in order to understand what is said."[96]